Daniel Bryan Discusses the Struggle of Dealing With His In-Ring Retirement, Explains How He Decided to Get Back Into the Ring

– As previously reported, WWE Hall of Famer Booker T recently interviewed Daniel Bryan for his Heated Conversations podcast, and he spoke about his retirement from the ring, his WWE contract, and many various subjects. Below are some highlights additional highlights from the interview (transcript via WrestlingInc.com).

Daniel Bryan on his struggle when he had to retire: “It was a real struggle for a long time. I think it’s because I’ve been doing this for my entire adult life. I started wrestling when I was 18-years old. I think one of the things is that wrestling is how I dealt with things. So when bad things would happen in your life, whatever it is, like OK, I had this creative outlet that was wrestling. I never cared about how much money I made or anything like that. If something’s kind of going wrong, that’s OK. I get to use my creativity. One of the hard things especially about it when I had to retire was that my dad had passed away. Now the way that I relate to that, I just didn’t properly know how to grieve. I’m sitting at home and my wife is on the road, and this is actually before I retired after my neck surgery, so I just really didn’t have this outlet to release this kind of thing.”

Daniel Bryan on deciding he would get back into the ring: “There was only a certain point after I retired that I thought I was never going to do it again. Actually, once they brought me back as GM and once I had sat ringside for that match, I thought, you know what, once my contract is up I’m going to wrestle one way or another. I never went to that point where it was like, I’m never going to be able to do this thing that I love again. The day I retired it felt like that. For the next couple months after I felt like that. The day that I retired was actually very very difficult because that, and I was trying to come at it with the point of view of acceptance and gratitude, but this idea that I didn’t want to be bitter about it. I don’t want to be sad about it in the the way that I presented it.”